I don't know about you, but I am pretty excited today, especially knowing
that the Clinton administration is now in its final year of wreaking havoc
and destruction upon the American landscape. The perpetuation of the Nanny
State and the erosion of many rights long held sacred by the American
people, have been steadily chipped away at by Clinton and his cohorts.
Fortunately, there have been enough members of Congress with the courage
to stand up to Clinton and keep some of the more intrusive measures from
becoming law, such as the Bank Secrecy Act and the Electronic Surveillance
Act among others.

If there were any one statement that epitomizes the current administration,
it would have had to come from Paul Begala, a Clinton staffer, who said,
"Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kinda cool." This statement
shows just how callously Clinton abused the Executive Order process to
get around Congress. He botched things up so bad in his first two years
in office, that in 1994, there was a revolution in Washington, giving
the Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time
in more than 40 years.

The down side of all this, is that through compromising where they should
have stuck to their guns, the margin is down to five seats in the House
and six seats in the Senate. This means that Democrat gains by those numbers
in this coming election would give control of those Houses back to the
Democrats. And it was the liberal and fiscally corrupt tax and spend policies
of the Democrats that got things in Washington as screwed up as they once
were.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that many Republicans in Congress
are in reality, Democrats in drag. Rather than stand on principle, they
check to see which way the wind is blowing, and in the process, have alienated
most of the American people into not caring one way or the other. That
jeopardizes the integrity of the voting process and the foundation of
representative government.

Another thing that jeopardizes the process of representative government
is that in too many cases, the best people won't run because of the savagery
of partisan politics and the media  and also because it exacts too
much of a demand on time away from their families, what with the long
hours and all.

When you have a complacent people such as we do, substantive change rarely
occurs. They are content to remain with the status quo, focusing more
on what Alan Greenspan and the Fed are going to do than with our elected
officials in Washington who are trying to accomplish what they can with
their hidden agenda.

If there is a lesson to be learned in all of this, it is to keep our
politicians on a short leash and accountable to their constituents for
their actions, for vigilance is the price of liberty in any free society.